Avicenna Cured a Sultan at Seventeen to Reach a Library, and Wrote the Medical Textbook Europe Used for Five Centuries

He memorized the Quran at ten, cured the ruler of Bukhara at seventeen to get into the Samanid palace library, read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times before a three-dirham book in a bazaar unlocked it, then spent thirty-eight years as a wandering physician-vizier writing the Canon of Medicine and the Book of Healing across courts, prisons, and military campaigns.

Forty times

A teenager in Bukhara had a problem. He had read Aristotle's Metaphysics, and he could not understand it. This was not for lack of trying. He had gone back and read it forty times, to the point where he had memorized the whole text. In his own account, dictated years later to his student Abu 'Ubayd al-Juzjani, he put it plainly: "I read the Metaphysics, but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author's object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to the point where I had memorized it." He gave up. "This is a book which there is no way of understanding," he told himself.

Then one afternoon he was in the booksellers' quarter. A salesman approached with a book, calling out for sale. The boy refused it "with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science." The salesman pressed: "Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams." He bought it. It was Abu Nasr al-Farabi's treatise on the purpose of the Metaphysics. He rushed home, read it, and the book he had memorized but never understood became clear. "I rejoiced at this," he wrote, "and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted."

The boy was Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, known to the Latin Middle Ages as Avicenna, and that three-dirham purchase is the hinge of his intellectual life. Until it, he was a precocious autodidact. After it, he was a system-builder who could reorganize the whole of Aristotelian science into a single structure. The story comes from his Autobiography, the only firsthand life of a major medieval Islamic philosopher that survives, and it is worth knowing what kind of document it is. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica and the Stanford Encyclopedia both stress, it is not a neutral memoir. The scholar Dimitri Gutas has argued that it is a literary construction designed to illustrate Avicenna's epistemology, his theory that some minds can hit the middle term of a syllogism by intuition alone. It is also, still, our most extensive source for his life, and the only one in his own voice. Read it as a philosopher shaping his legend, and read it as the closest we can get to the man.

He was born around 980 in the village of Afshana, near the Samanid capital of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. His father, a state official from Balkh, had been posted to govern a royal estate. The family moved to Bukhara when he was small. In his account: "A teacher of the Quran and a teacher of literature were provided for me, and when I reached the age of ten I had finished the Quran and many works of literature, so that people were greatly amazed at me." His father and brother had converted to Ismaili Shiism, and he listened to them discuss the soul and the intellect, but, he says, "my soul would not accept it." He was a Hanafi Sunni who would not inherit his father's faith any more than he would inherit a tutor's limits.

A philosopher named al-Natili came to lodge in the house and teach him logic. Within a short time the pupil had outpaced the teacher. "Whatever problem he posed I conceptualized better than he," Avicenna recalled, "so he advised my father against my taking up any occupation other than learning." Al-Natili soon left for Gurganj, and the boy kept going alone, through Euclid and Ptolemy's Almagest, then into the natural sciences and metaphysics. He turned to medicine around thirteen. "Medicine is not one of the difficult sciences," he wrote, "and therefore I excelled in it in a very short time, to the point that distinguished physicians began to read the science of medicine under me."

The picture he draws of himself between sixteen and eighteen is almost monastic in its ferocity, with one unmonastic detail. "I did not sleep completely through a single night nor devote myself to anything else by day." He kept files on every proof he examined, laying out its syllogistic premises. When a problem baffled him, "I used to visit the mosque frequently and worship, praying humbly to the All-Creating until He opened the mystery of it to me and made the difficult seem easy." At night he set out a lamp and read, and "whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me." He even worked in his sleep: "whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dream; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep." By eighteen he considered himself finished. "Everything which I knew at that time is just as I know it now," he wrote. "I have not added anything to it to this day."

The cure and the library

Mastery of books was one thing. Access to books was another, and in tenth-century Bukhara access was gated by a court. The Samanid sultan Nuh ibn Mansur fell ill with a complaint that baffled his physicians. Avicenna's name had spread, and the doctors asked the sultan to summon the teenager. He did, the boy joined the consultation, and the sultan recovered. The reward he asked for was not money. "One day I asked him to permit me to go into their library, to get to know it and to read its books." He was admitted to a building of many rooms, "and in each room there were chests of books piled one on top of the other," sorted by science, one room for Arabic language and poetry, another for jurisprudence. "I saw books whose names had not reached very many people and which I had not seen before that time, nor have I seen since."

This is the mechanism of his early life, and it is the opposite of the romantic story of solitary genius. His mind was self-made, but his materials came from a dynasty. He traded a cure for a library, and the library became the forge in which a teenager with a photographic memory assembled the entire inherited stock of Greek science. He left Bukhara having read what almost no one else alive had read. The Canon of Medicine and the Book of Healing, the two works that would run through European universities for centuries, are unthinkable without those rooms.

Then the dynasty fell. In 999 the Turkic Qarakhanids took Bukhara and ended the Samanids. Avicenna, a high functionary closely identified with the fallen house, saw what was coming. In the Autobiography he gives no political explanation, only the formula "necessity led me to forsake Bukhara," a phrase the Stanford Encyclopedia singles out as the start of his lifelong itinerant career. He was around nineteen. He would not have a permanent home again.

The physician-vizier

What followed was thirty-eight years of moving. He went north to Gurganj in Khwarazm, where a minister patron of the Greek sciences took him into the service of the local Ma'munid ruler. He left again, "through necessity," traveled west through the Khurasani cities, and arrived in Jurjan only to find that the cultivated patron he had hoped to serve, the Ziyarid ruler Qabus, had been starved to death by his own soldiers. There, around 1013, he met al-Juzjani, the man who would write down the Autobiography, continue the biography after his death, and stay with him for the next twenty-five years.

In Ray, near modern Tehran, he served the Buyid amir Majd al-Dawla and the regent Sayyida Shirin, treating the amir's melancholia. He moved south to Hamadan, cured its Buyid ruler Shams al-Dawla of a colic, and was made vizier. The troops, Kurds and Turks, mutinied and demanded the new vizier's death; Shams al-Dawla banished him instead, then recalled him after forty days when illness returned. He was twice vizier, and twice the post nearly killed him.

The shape of his working life now becomes clear, and it is the strangest part of the story. A man who needed a great library to think had no library. A man who needed quiet to write had no quiet. He treated patients by day, conducted vizieral business, and attended the prince's evenings. When Shams al-Dawla died in 1021, Avicenna judged it prudent to disappear. In Juzjani's careful phrasing, he "saw fit not to remain in the same state nor to resume the same duties, and trusted that the prudent thing to do... would be to hide in anticipation of an opportunity to leave that region." He hid in the house of an apothecary and kept writing, turning out fifty pages of the Book of Healing a day, by Juzjani's count. He had been secretly writing to the Kakuyid ruler of Isfahan, Ala al-Dawla. The Hamadan court found out, ransacked the apothecary's house, and imprisoned him in the fortress of Fardajan outside the city. He spent four months there, composing the allegorical Hayy ibn Yaqzan and logical treatises from memory.

Ala al-Dawla marched on Hamadan, ended the rival's rule, and freed him. Avicenna declined to stay and instead left the city with his brother, Juzjani, and two slaves, dressed as Sufis. He reached Isfahan, where, Juzjani says, the ruler gave him "the respect and esteem which someone like him deserved." It was, by all accounts, the most stable stretch of his life, the last thirteen years. He completed the Book of Healing there, the work Juzjani had first solicited in Hamadan with the request "comment on the works of Aristotle." It had taken seventeen years and three cities. He wrote the Persian Book of Knowledge for Ala al-Dawla, one of the first substantial works of philosophy in Persian, and the Pointers and Reminders. He accompanied his patron on campaign, which is how medieval scientists worked: patronage of learning legitimized a ruler's throne, so the scholar traveled with the army.

The mechanism here is the reverse of what you would expect. Political chaos did not stop the work. It distributed it. The Canon of Medicine, a one-million-word encyclopedia in five books listing some 760 drugs, was assembled in fragments across Ray and Hamadan. The Book of Healing, the vast philosophical encyclopedia that shaped Thomas Aquinas, was drafted in an apothecary's back room, lost in the sack of Isfahan by the Ghaznavids, and rewritten from memory and from his students' notes. The medieval scholar's patronage currency was his usefulness, and Avicenna was useful twice over, as a physician who could keep a ruler alive and as a vizier who could run a state. He paid for his writing by healing and administering, and the writing happened in the gaps.

What survived him

He never stopped moving, and in the end the moving killed him. He had suffered colic for years. In 1037, accompanying Ala al-Dawla on a campaign near Isfahan, he contracted a severe attack, struggled back to Hamadan, refused the regimen his helpers imposed, and died in June 1037, around fifty-seven. He was buried in Hamadan. The great physician could not cure himself, and, according to the later biographical tradition, would not let anyone else try hard enough to do it.

What survived was the largest body of work of any medieval Islamic thinker. Of roughly 450 works attributed to him, around 240 survive, 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine. The two that crossed into Europe changed the continent. In the twelfth century the Italian translator Gerard of Cremona rendered the Canon of Medicine into Latin in Toledo, and it became the standard medical textbook in European universities, taught from Montpellier to Louvain into the seventeenth century. In the last thirty years of the fifteenth century alone it passed through fifteen Latin editions and one Hebrew. From the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries he was ranked with Hippocrates and Galen as princeps medicorum, the prince of physicians. The Book of Healing, translated as Sufficientia, shaped scholastic philosophy so deeply that Avicennism was proscribed in Paris in 1210, and his distinction between essence and existence entered the architecture of Aquinas's proofs. Dante placed him in Limbo among the virtuous non-Christian thinkers, beside Virgil, Homer, Socrates, and Saladin. The historian of science George Sarton called him "the most famous scientist of Islam and one of the most famous of all races, places, and times."

The man behind that legacy is almost impossible to see clearly, and not only because nine centuries have passed. The Autobiography is a philosophical performance, and Juzjani's continuation, though based on twenty-five years at his side, is the only narrative we have. Later writers like Bayhaqi added anecdotes of debauchery and deathbed remorse that the Encyclopaedia Iranica warns "merit little credence." What the sources do show, plainly, is a mind of unbearable speed housed in a body that a collapsing empire kept putting on the road. He had insisted, at eighteen, that he had learned everything he would ever need. The next thirty-eight years tested that claim in the only way available: by taking away every place he tried to settle, and watching what he wrote in the ruins. He wrote the textbook that taught Europe medicine, and he wrote much of it in a cell and on horseback.

Read the full life: The Life of Ibn Sina: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation, translated by William E. Gohlman (SUNY Press, 1974), the only critical edition of Avicenna's Autobiography, completed by his student al-Juzjani.